Ann Curry stood with her toes on the edge of a bridge, 170 feet above the River Tees in England. She looked at the horizon, thought of her charity, and dropped into nothingness.
She was harnessed to bungee cords and had been told it was safe, but it was still a leap of faith. More than an hour later, in the TODAY studio in New York, TODAY’s Hoda Kotb wanted to know what she was thinking before she jumped.
“I was really thinking, ‘I hope this does some good,’ ” she said. “If you’re going to do something as crazy and stupid as that, you want to feel it was worth it. I wanted some good to come out of it, and I think it did.”
She raised more than $10,000 through her adventure for Save the Children, a charity whose work in war zones she’d visited she admired, and The United Way.
She also inspired the awe of Academy Award-winning actor Tom Hanks, who watched the jump live on Monday with TODAY’s Meredith Vieira, Al Roker and David Gregory.
“I can’t follow that. I’ve done nothing,” said Hanks, who was in New York to talk about his new movie, “Charlie Wilson’s War,” for which he and his co-stars, Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman, received Golden Globe nominations.
The movie, based on the true story of the Texas congressman who led the covert fight to expel the Soviet Union from Afghanistan in the 1980s, was also nominated for Best Comedy.